28 August 2009

You know me: I can’t stand W.W.IImovies; lately, each one, domestic or foreign (the lovely Kaibei excluded), has been a cliché-ridden exercise in facile tear jerking and/or Hollywood Prestige award-baiting. Inglourious Basterds, too, is chockablock with genre clichés, but Tarantino’s ingenious coup is to replace one set of tropes with another: as you point out, his latest is a Western, spaghettisploitation with a National Socialist twist, merely disguised as a war movie. When [SS Man] Landa shows up at the Frenchman’s house in the first scene, it’s like a railroad baron appearing at a dirt farmer’s cabin. With one frame, he pays obvious homage to the last shot of The Searchers, and the whole movie, like the Kill Bill dyad, feels like one long tribute to Once Upon a Time in the West. (The opening title card even reads, “Once Upon a Time in Occupied France”. He must watch Leone’s movie, like, every day.) As such, he gives the W.W. II movie a much-needed kick in the ass.

Assayas’ enchanting and elegiac study of mortality and objects, Summer Hours (L'Heure d'été), is a film about artifacts—about the significance and essential value of our precious possessions. The film takes as its subject the countryside home of a long-dead artist and the pricey to priceless paintings, furniture and other various objets d’art that fill it. His niece, Hélène (Edith Scob), cares for the property when the film opens, but she is on the verge of death herself, leaving her three children—Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier)—to decide the fate of the estate. Those three actors have a remarkable conviviality; combined with Sandrine Mauvezin’s thorough set dressings—cluttered old houses; cramped, book-lined apartments—Summer Hours has a deeply lived-in quality, which helps lend authenticity to its emotions.

Those emotions reveal themselves subtly; despite the occasional on-screen bickering between the siblings, Summer Hours is a calming film—the first word that came to mind after leaving the theater was “lovely”; it’s just a lovely film—largely set around bowls of fruit and al fresco lunch tables. The squabbling that does occur emerges largely from the siblings’ disparate philosophies on what to do with Great Uncle’s things: Frédéric has a nostalgic reverence for them, particularly two Corots, and wants them to stay in the family; Adrienne and Jérémie, taking after their mother—“no need to become keepers of this tomb,” she tells her children before she dies, of this “bric-a-brac from another era”—see the pieces as saleable, as equity. (Not coincidentally, both pro-sale siblings no longer call France home, which suggests something about a globalizing world with no more room for wistful, narrow-mindedly ethnocentric Francophiles.)

There’s tragedy here; while Hélène’s children view some individual items with tender hearts, the collection taken together boasts a value that transcends mere sentimentality. Imbued with memories and bits of a person, they come to represent, if not embody, a family and its shared lives. They’re “life’s residue,” as meaningful as a memory, a photograph, a headstone. The film’s opening shot, a flickering image of the house—and the subsequent Mizoguchian tracking shot of kids and dogs running down trails and climbing trees—sets the misty-eyed tone, the pining for the bygone that carries through the film.

But Assayas is no naïve romantic; for him, objects possess a dual function: they are meant to be used, but also valued. Statues should be displayed, even if they run the likelihood of smashing into pieces. At the end of the film, we see unsupervised and promiscuous teens at the house, boozing to blasting hip-hop without regard for the history of the grounds on which they’re partying; it’s equally dismaying when, right before that scene, we see many of the house’s valuables isolated from their functions, stored behind the velvet ropes and display cases of the Musee d’Orsay. Both approaches get it wrong: the house is meant to be lived in but not debauched; the items are meant to be utilized, not admired from behind glass. Our heirlooms are meant neither to be ignored nor revered.

When Frédéric allows the house’s longtime keeper to take something as a memento, she chooses a simple vase because she thinks it’s “ordinary”; unbeknownst to her, it turns out to one of the collection’s more valuable pieces. Assays suggests that the only real value objects possess is the one we assign to them—so what’s regrettable here isn’t that precious things have lost their value. It’s that, in this crass world of mass-produced sneakers, we’ve stopped assigning any value to the meaningful things we own. Desks are no longer passed down from generation to generation; we make desks to be thrown away. The real tragedy is that snipped thread of historical continuity and consequent nihilism. Grade: A-

19 August 2009

No one should deny that Andrew Bujalski does one thing really well: He crafts sensitive, masterfully performed films about contemporary youngsters and their inability to commit or communicate. The debate lies in whether such a narrow focus on such a slight concern has begun to wear thin—and so short into his career!—or whether it was ever thick enough to begin with.

Bujalski is the Apatow of the Underground; as directors, both have only threefilms under their belts, but each has spawned a movement so pervasive that it has nearly rendered their own films superfluous. Apatow gave us the modernBromance; Bujalski has given us muh…muh…mum…don’t make me say it! He sets his latest, Beeswax, in Austin, which invites (unfavorable) comparisons to Slacker, Richard Linklater’s one-generation-ago chronicle of directionless youths. The edge-of-thirty types here, both un- and mis-directed, may be a bit less vigorous in their opposition to work than their ‘90s forebears, but the most glaring difference between the two sets of Texans is in degrees of eloquence: slackers were hyperarticulate; Bujalski’s mutterers are decidedly not, which may be what separates them not only from their immediate predecessors but from all generations prior. It’s what makes them historically unique and thus, ostensibly, worthy of being the subject of a decade-long oeuvre.

Goddam, even the cellphones are broken in Beeswax: the characters literally (and figuratively) cannot fucking communicate with one another. (Bujalski’s symbols dance on that fine line between clever and too clever.) They’re characters who couch their definitives in qualifying maybe-sortas; they’re wishy-washy, too. Lauren (Maggie Hatcher) opens the film by suggesting to her boyfriend that they “try” breaking up; her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), is introduced taking a practice bar exam, agonizing between multiple choices. But it’s Lauren’s sister Jeannie (Tillie Hatcher; she and Maggie are twins) around whom the plot revolves. She runs a vintage boutique with a largely absent business partner, with whom her relationship is becoming increasingly antagonistic. Except, they never really confront one another; in actual conversation—like, over the phone—they just say, “we’ll talk later,” as in, never. They can only tell each other how they feel through mediated means: emails, legal contracts and subpoenas.

Beeswax, which jokingly has been called a legal thriller since it’s anything but, is a bit plottier than previous Bujalski features and more streamlined than, say, Mutual Appreciation (whose bloated running time felt self-indulgent), even though it still feels under-edited. I guess that’s the point of a Bujalski movie, though: to highlight the masterful-to-the-point-of-painful naturalism of his stammering non-professional performers—to show how our struggles with language inform our struggles with relationships, both romantic and platonic. Though I feel like, I get it already. If that’s all that he’s after, then at this point, what’s the point? Grade: B-

A dispatch from Lynch’s pre-Lost Highway accessible phase, Wild at Heart won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, though many critics maligned it: classic Lynch-hater Roger Ebert called it “sophomoric” and “dishonest”. Dishonest? But it grapples with the central fascination at play in much of the director’s early work: young lovers under threat from enormous criminal conspiracies. Nic Cage, before he became the self-parody he is today, stars as Sailor, clad in a snakeskin jacket that serves as a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom; a pre-Jurassic Park Laura Dern serves as his love interest in a performance so strong she makes you cry just by nipping at a candy necklace. He’s Elvis; she’s Marilyn. Gangsters chase the two across the country, and the film settles into a road movie, traveling through a Lynchian landscape of grotesques from Jack Nance to Willem Defoe. All the while, the director expresses his love of Americana and for cultural stuffs that predate the sexual revolution. Sailor sings “Love Me” and “Love Me Tender,” for example, but the work most on Lynch’s mind is The Wizard of Oz. At root, Wild at Heart is a trip down a yellow brick road — one that runs through the recesses of the director’s infamously nightmarish subconscious.

16 August 2009

The director of District 9, the fairly ambitious, sometimes fake-documentary about extraterrestrial settlements in South Africa (and accompanying government perfidy), has been making the rounds, telling reporters his film is an allegory for apartheid. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to be so blunt about his film’s Meaning: it seems to imply that Blomkamp is a bit desperate to establish that his is a Serious Film—that the blockbuster-of-the-week guise is but a mere trapping.

That proves to be more of an albatross than a virtue: because District 9 packs some social-issues seriousness into its sci-fi wackiness, I’m tempted to hold it to a higher standard than it could live up to; the movie is superlative popcorn fare, but disappointing Cinema...

07 August 2009

Had A Perfect Getaway, a romping, cheeky, self-conscious and crowd-pleasing horror-mystery, been released in the 80s, we might herald it as a lost masterpiece. But coming out now, as it does, the movie feels derivative — even if, otherwise, it's a gas. American horror got self-referential in the 90s, after Wes Craven went nuts with his New Nightmare and Scream, films that adopted Tarantino's then de rigueur genre fluency; they played with the conventional horror structures by openly calling them out, placing a po-mo focus on the text. Some more recent horror movies have moved on to investigate the horror movie's formal aspects: each in their own way, to varying degrees of success, Vacancy, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead and Quarantine have handled the relationship between the camera and the viewer, between screen and spectator.

A Perfect Getaway starts down that road — its main character captures everything on a camcorder — but soon abandons it. Rumor has it that the 90s, as they drift further and further into history, are coming back in a big way; this movie, then, is the first throwback to that Kevin Williamson era of winking genre pieces too smart for their own structural strictures — though this one abandons the slasher playbook for a more classical whodunit model.

Thematically, the two temporally disconnected story strands--Julia Child writing her cookbook, Julie Powell writing her blog about cooking--complement each other well...But for me it wasn’t so neat in practice. In last year’s Doubt, Amy Adams turned in a strong performance playing off of Meryl Streep: a teary mouse under the tutelage of a lion. It worked well as real-life allegory, too: the Grand Dame dominating the next generation of young starlets. Here, though, Adams is competing to hold our attention when Streep’s off-screen, and she’s just not that good. Hell, no one is. Streep is a national treasure, man; they should put her on Auto-Oscar until she dies...Even Ephron seems electrified by her; in contrast to the Child sections—which were rife with unnecessary anti-McCarthy digs, because Hollywood just can’t pass up the chance to knock Mr. Blacklist—the contemporary Julie portions almost seem shot by another director; lifeless settings, overscored, overnarrated, as if to compensate for the lack of verve. “I’m not Julia Child,” Julie admits late in the film. Yeah, and you ain’t no Streep, either.

05 August 2009

What is love? Ask a stupid question and you get a stupid movie. Paper Heart, a "50 percent documentary" for tweens and by (people with the mental capacity of) tweens, stars Charlyne Yi, a button-cheeked grinner best known hitherto for a brief but memorable appearance as a stoner chick in Knocked Up; she makes a poor narrator — she's not particularly charming or smart — and the film's thesis smacks of disingenuous gimmickry: Yi believes that love doesn't exist, or at least that she can't feel it. She wishes she were so sociopathic! Instead, she comes off as a college-aged kid who thinks she's smarter than everyone else — or, boo hoo, just doesn't fit in to a love-rife society. She and her director Jasenovec (played on-screen by Jake Johnson) travel the country (including a quick trip to NYC so they can find some gays), interviewing Ordinary People — high school sweethearts, musicians, bikers, romance novelists, divorce professionals, biochemists, kids at a playground — on the subject of love, true and otherwise.

Those interviews are stunningly banal, full of pat insights followed by stories both cautionary and optimistic about love lost and found.

04 August 2009

Apatow has to be one of the most inefficient storytellers in Hollywood, and it’s amazing that he gets away with it film after film. The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and now this movie all suffer from the same problem: they go on way too long, self indulgently long, playing with drama with the sophistication of a sappy Lifetime movie. A lot of comedies (like, say, Wedding Crashers) have this plotting problem nowadays; the comedy doesn’t inform the story, it’s just a gloss that makes some trite romance or whatnot go down more easily—until the third act, when the filmmakers get mired down in humorlessly tying up the loose ends of the plot that no one cares about. “You come for the testoteriffic ambience,” Jessica Winter wrote a few years ago in the Voice, “and you stay for the chick flick.” The American Pie Effect. But we’re here to laugh, right? Not get wrapped up in the phony lives of 2-D characters?

God knows that now, more than ever, we need another vampire movie. But seriously — we could use a good one. And thus far, the recent American contributions to the genre have been deficient; ever sex-obsessed, our culture's vampire narratives have run the gamut of carnal extremes, from chaste pre-teen fantasies to cheesy oversexed soap operas. It takes foreigners to lay bare the inherent romanticism of the vampire picture — the sensitivity; hitherto, Let the Right One In, the Swedish adolescence-allegory, has been the only laudable entry into the Neo-Vampire canon. But now we can add the Korean Thirst (Bakjwi) to this (finally) growing list. Director Park Chan-wook's coup is to toggle between playing his vampirism for laughs and using it to tease out an operatic, Sweeney Todd-level of tragedy. It's not a great vampire story; it's a deliciously overblown and strangely moving love story. About vampires.

Roy Andersson is a mean old man: unlike most comedy directors, he’s not laughing with his characters. He’s laughing at them. The pathos is ironic in You, the Living (Du Levande), a gut-busting yet underbearing expose of selfishness and self-pity; nearly every scene plays as a satire of the dour Scandinavian misery that was Ingmar Bergman’s specialty: a schoolteacher bursts into tears in front of her young students, and it provokes giggles; her salesman husband’s similar breakdown in front of a few elderly customers does the same. Stop whining! The light classical (and, sometimes, Dixieland) that dominates the soundtrack establishes a breezy tone, and Andersson’s camera — planted at a remove and rarely moved — establishes a distance that alchemizes tragedy into comedy.

Katherine Heigl, star of The Ugly Truth, famously made a bit of a stink after she made Knocked Up, when she publicly accused that film of sexism. Good for her, I guess? But she loses any accrued feminist credibility when she makes tommyrot like this. After spending the whole movie trying to please her man, a bland to the point of irritating doctor (Days of Our Lives vet Eric Winter), by dressing sexily and playing coy, coquettish games, her character learns a lesson in the end to Be Herself. OK, I guess that’s empowering, but not only does it seem half-hearted, her True Self is like a caricature of The Shrew; in the movie she’s repeatedly defined as a “control freak,” which is just a euphemism for a bitch. Criticizing your boyfriend because he brought you un-chilled champagne doesn’t indicate a need to be in charge of the situation. It’s just ill mannered.